NASA's Lucy spacecraft will swoop past a small asteroid this weekend as it makes its way to an even bigger prize: the unexplored swarms of asteroids out near Jupiter.
How can we successfully collect and return samples from Mercury and Venus to Earth? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the ...
NASA's Lucy spacecraft is six days and less than 50 million miles (80 million km) away from its second close encounter with an asteroid; this time, the small main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson.
What can exozodiacal dust, also called exozodi, teach astronomers about identifying Earth-like exoplanets? This is what a recently submitted NASA white paper—which highlights key findings from the annual Architecture Concept ...
The asteroid that once had a small chance of striking Earth and now might slam into the moon resembles a spinning hockey puck, scientists said Tuesday.
In April 2019, rare primitive meteorites fell near the town of Aguas Zarcas in northern Costa Rica. In an article published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, an international team of researchers describes the ...
In late 2024, astronomers spotted asteroid 2024 YR4 on a trajectory that could potentially threaten Earth. This observation triggered a fervid series of observations of the object—possibly as big as a football field—to determine ...
Where do meteorites of different types come from? In a review paper in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, astronomers trace the impact orbit of observed meteorite falls to several previously unidentified source ...
New Southwest Research Institute-led modeling indicates the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson may have formed about 150 million years ago when a larger parent asteroid broke apart; its orbit and spin properties have ...
Despite their overall similarities, asteroids are usually pretty distinct from one another. Vesta has a very different spectroscopic profile than Psyche, for example. So it might come as no surprise that another of the main ...
